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I have had some success with SEO running my inspection company website myself using weebly drag and drop which has terrible reviews for SEO and ipage for hosting. I really don’t care who you use, and neither does the search engines in my opinion. Anyways, I typically rank 2nd for my market area on Google (the person in first has been around 20 plus years with the same well-built site). As a disclaimer I’m far from a SEO expert, and never received any formal training. I just used trial and error, and my recent trial worked. My logic is if it worked with me there is no reason it couldn’t be replicated and hopefully work for you.
I would like to lay this out in three parts. The mindset; you need to have the mindset for building your site on how search engines think. Technical; your site needs what the search engine looks for. Tactical; a plan of attack to force search engines to move you up the ladder. Mindset A search engine is a match maker. You are single and the client is single. The client is searching for a hot date, and types in specifically what they want in a partner “home inspector near me” for example. Now it’s up to the search engine to crawl billions of pages to decide in order who is the best match and rank them in order. It’s that simple! Everything you do on your website you should think to yourself “if someone was searching for me (a home inspector) why would a search engine who doesn’t know me put their neck on the line and rank me high on the list? Simply stated the search engine needs to have a high level of confidence you are providing what the client wants. Technical -go to every website your business info is listed. This would be yelp, facebook, your local chamber of commerce website, etc, EVERYWHERE your business may be listed, and make sure of three things. The phone number, address, and your web address to your site is written EXACTLY the same ANYWHERE it is found. -make a knock out google MyBusiness page (I have an entire separate video you can watch youtu.be/bQTXDytYsiY HERE) this is a MUST. On to your actual website -Your website MUST be mobile friendly meaning it will appear on a phone or tablet in a slightly different format for easy navigation. -Every page MUST have a title (thats not the page name). The title should be 70 characters or less and read like a sentence WITH key words, but not a list of key words. For example my page title of my home page is “Clarksville Home Inspection Company - Buying or selling real estate?” It covers home inspections, my area of Clarksville, and real estate. -Every page MUST have a unique title (do not just repeat titles. For example my contact page title is “Need A Clarksville Home Inspector? You need a home inspection!” -Mete keywords area used by some engines and not others. It won’t hurt to have Meta Keywords and these ARE in a list format my Meta Keywords are “Home Inspection, Home, Inspection, Clarksville Home Inspectors, Clarksville Home Inspection, Inspectors in Clarksville, Clarksville Home Inspector, Home Inspection Cost, Home Inspector in Clarksville, House Inspector, House Inspectors, Licensed Inspector” -Every photo should have a description or caption even if it’s not visible to the public. Search engines hate photos with no description because they don’t know what it is and remember they want to be confident in the match! The description or caption can be simple. For example I have a picture of a corroded pipe. The photo caption is “corroded pipe found during a Clarksville Home Inspection”. Notice the play on key words there? -Your page description should be two to three sentences and read as a paragraph but filled with key words. For example my home page description is “Clarksville based home inspection company covering Clarksville, Tennessee; Montgomery County, Tennessee and surrounding areas. Veteran owned and operated. Experienced home inspector. Licensed and insured. Real estate and property inspections” -Your heading level 1 and level 2 must include key terms but read like a sentence or title (not just a string of words). For example my home page heading is “Buying A Home? Getting Ready To Sell? You Need A Home Inspection!” and my level two sub heading is “An Experience Clarksville Tennessee Home Inspector On Your Side!”. Both of those heading are sentence style, but have the keywords search engines will crawl when making the match. Search engines will know if you are trying to game the system and just list key words and you will get push down on their confidence level for a match. -Content can be light and to the point in my opinion. It has worked for me at least. -ANY links you provide on your site MUST work. Check them ALL! -Load Google Analytics onto your site (very easy just follow Googles directions) I don’t care if you never look at your analytics or know how to use the site. Google will give you major kudos for adding their analytics tracker to the site, and it will do wonders to help search engines get more confident about your site! -This my appear simplistic, but in all honesty the above technical stuff is how I set mine up. Tactical The tactical is how you make your website perform. You must have the mindset and technical ducks in a row first! -Your website needs a blog. I know what you are thinking “I hate writing and don’t have time for a blog” great! Make it a video blog! When you are inspecting and come across something unique or informative pull out your phone and take a 30 second to 2 minute video explaining what you are doing. Trust me NO ONE cares what you sound or look like. Just do it. -Now load these videos to your business facebook page, but more importantly create a YouTube channel under your business name (very easy) and load the videos there. Make the titles something relevant. I talked about a TPRV on a water heater one day. The title was “Hot Water Tank Problems Found During a Clarksville Home Inspection”. In the description I just have my business name, phone number, and web address. -Now add the YouTube link to your blog (don’t load the direct video from your phone). Two things happens here. Google who runs YouTube and 90 percent of search engines will see the YouTube Channel and the relevant titles you will make for the videos and the YouTube link is being used on your website as the video blog. (if that did make sense go to my website zumbrohomeinspection.com and click on blog) -list your website and business info anywhere else you can find which is authoritative. For example Thumbtack has great SEO. Here is a neat fact. You can list your business on Thumbtack and never actually set up your account to bid on jobs. Actually my Thumbtack profile shows up a few ranks below my actual site even though I don’t use them. You can do the same thing with Yelp, etc. The more places you site is listed the more confident the search engines will be to rank you higher. -After all that is done (should really only take an afternoon except for the blog which will be a work in progress) you need to do everything you can to get your website listed by a few authoritative sources. Its link building and I hate that term and most people go about it wrong. Don’t try to get your website anywhere. Find a FEW highly authoritative organizations which you may be able to get your site listed on. For example organizations such as Internachi, ashi, etc if you are a member and make sure your web address is accurate. -The best thing you can do to SUPERCHARGE your ranking is getting your website listed by a highly authoritative source such as a mainstream news organization. Write to local editors and see if they would like you to write a home safety article etc. If they do GREAT! Write it and make sure your website is in the article which all news organizations post online today as well. One link to your site in a highly authoritative site is worth 10,000 links in nonsense sites. -Last dirty little secret. The publisher may not be interested. That’s OK because most papers allow for “sponsored articles” it’s not considered an advertisement, but you have to pay to play. For example in our local paper you can pay $350 to include an article in the paper and you can add your contact info and web address. It gets published along with the paper like articles (not ads) and digital as well. That back link is worth just as much as the free one. Websites can see a MAJOR bump in ranking a few weeks after such articles are published. -Vary last dirty little secret. For the most part home inspection searches are not very common. Search engines will track how often people visit sites and it helps them establish confidence. From the analytics I have seen most home inspectors websites are only viewed a few hundred times a month. Make sure you ask everyone you know to check out your site and give you feedback. When a normal inspection site only gets a few hundred visits a month the bump in the traffic will be noticed by the search engines and once again helps them feel more confident to rank you high thinking this is what people searching for a home inspector is looking for. Last word of advice SEO is not instant. The search engines are constantly crawling and indexing websites and some changes can take days to change your SEO ranking. I’m sure some SEO experts are going to tell me how wrong I am and I didn’t use the right terminology blah, blah, blah. I’m only writing this because it is what gave me results. |
Clarksville Tennessee Home Inspectors Daily BlogAuthorJesse Zumbro is the owner and inspector of Zumbro Home Inspection. A Clarksville, TN based home inspection company. Archives
May 2019
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